Michelle Zauner, author behind the soul-stirring New York Times bestseller "Crying in H Mart" (2021) / Courtesy of Munhakdongne Publishing

Throughout her early life, Michelle Zauner's biennial summer escape to Korea was a journey filled with stuffy heat, live seafood dishes and her halmoni's (grandmother) cozy three-bedroom apartment.

These trips from her home in Oregon to Seoul were a consistent thread connecting Zauner, a biracial Asian American child, to the Korean side of her family. During the six-week visits, she and her mother would stay with her halmoni and two aunts, filling the already snug apartment with jubilant "hwatu" card game nights and the fermented, garlic-infused aromas of homemade dishes.

This cherished summertime ritual was upended in her teens after her grandmother's death. And just years later, Zauner, in her early 20s, faced the loss of both her mother and aunt to cancer.

From 2014 onward, she immersed herself in a series of creative pursuits — the endeavors that served not only to navigate the waves of grief but to gather "evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn't die when they did."

She penned the soul-stirring New York Times bestseller "Crying in H Mart" (2021), memorializing her fraught and volatile relationship with her late mother as the two wandered lost without fully recognizing their cultural divide. Under the band Japanese Breakfast, she crafted dreamy music as both an ode to her pain and a celebration of eventual joy, culminating in two Grammy nominations for her third album, "Jubilee."

And perhaps most profoundly, she sought out food that embodied memories hovering on the brink of fading away.

"For a long time, I couldn't remember my mother before she was sick because the last concentrated period I spent with her was as her caregiver. That was really heartbreaking for me," Zauner told The Korea Times in an interview held before a talk at the recently-ended Seoul International Book Fair, her first major literary event in the country.

"Then, when I started going to H Mart [the Korean American supermarket chain], I found a can of ‘pat' [red bean] and suddenly had a very visceral image of my mother in a sundress, looking very healthy with long hair, grinding an ice machine and laughing as she made ‘patbingsu' [red bean shaved ice]."

That was when it hit her: if she kept coming back to these aisles, stuffed with fermented sauces, dried seafood and bundles of scallions, she could reclaim with her body the spirited image of her now-gone mother — in the kitchen, in the garage with a camp stove and in the living room of her grandmother's apartment.

So, she returned again and again to savor those flavors that encapsulated her memories.

"I realized if I don't do this kind of upkeep, I was going to lose this part of myself. For me, it was like cultural maintenance," the 35-year-old recalled.

The cover of Michelle Zauner's "Crying in H Mart" (2021) / Courtesy of Knopf

Zauner's commitment to cultural preservation now includes learning the Korean language. She has immersed herself in Seoul, living the life of what she describes as a "humble Korean student" for nearly six months, studying at Sogang University's Korean Language Education Center.

In fact, she is planning her second book to document her year-long adventure of acquiring a second language, one that had always existed as a distant echo in her life. Its pages will also be sprinkled with funny anecdotes of what it's like to be "a 35-year-old Grammy nominee among a bunch of students much younger than me," the author said with a chuckle.

"When you're learning to speak another language, your personality starts to change a lot, because you have to be very careful with your words. Words that you know are so much smaller than everyone else's, and they become very valuable," she added.

A full year in Korea is the longest period she has ever spent in her mother's homeland. No longer just a brief summer family vacation destination, the country has now become entirely hers to explore and discover.

"A big part of the new book is going to be about finding my own version of Korea in the alternative creative scene and the queer community — parts of the country that my mom and my family would have never experienced or exposed me to," she said.

Most recently, this journey of discovery is what led her to perform onstage alongside female indie musicians, Lee Min-hwi and Lee Lang, at the Asian Pop Festival in Incheon, where the three belted out the mellow ‘90s hit, "A Million Roses."

Michelle Zauner speaks at a talk at this year's Seoul International Book Fair at COEX in southern Seoul, June 27. Courtesy of Korean Publishers Association

Being surrounded by Korean friends has also helped her reflect on her mother and her expressions of parental affection in a new light — an experience that she didn't get to have growing up as the only Asian American kid at a school in suburban Eugene, Oregon.

"All that time, I thought it was just my mom being a difficult person until I heard from them that there are other Korean daughters and mothers who have this kind of issue," she recalled. She wasn't the only daughter getting yelled at whenever she bought her mother a gift. She wasn't the only one navigating life under an overbearing yet devoted eye.

"That was really comforting to know, but also a little sad. If I knew that as a younger person, I could have understood her better. Our relationship could have been easier."

This October marks the 10th anniversary of her mother Chongmi's passing. And Zauner feels like her grief is always changing.

"I don't think there's anything that you can do but ride that emotion," she noted. "Now, when it comes to me, I'm honestly very grateful because it reminds me that I loved someone so much that my body is still feeling it. Holding on to these emotions is the closest way I can keep her with me."

And if her writing can bring any comfort to someone going through that inevitable experience and finding bits and pieces of themselves within the pages, she added, she can die happily, feeling she has served a purpose in this world.